Integration of UI Services into SOA Based BPM Applications

A service oriented architecture (SOA) combined with business process management (BPM) puts enterprises in a position to build applications in a very flexible and agile way. The SOA makes services available and BPM suites (BPMS) combine these services with user tasks to complex business processes. Integration of data and application services is supported by common technical standards and a wide range of products that are applicable out of the box. In contrast, the number of standardized user interface (UI) components that can be composed in SOA based BPM applications in a straightforward way is quite low. This is because the demands on such components are much higher. They must be embeddable into graphical front ends and interact with end users as well as the underlying business models. Unfortunately, there is no generally accepted approach and BPM tools provide their own proprietary mechanisms. The main drawback is the lack of re-usability resulting in higher cost and longer development phases. This paper derives basic requirements for UI components in order to make them generally applicable for SOA based BPM applications. It defines UI services meeting these demands in a platform-independent manner and presents one possible implementation based on JSR-286 Portlets and WSRP 2.0. This solution allows the development and embedding of system-independent and re-usable UI services by slightly extending existing BPM suites and enterprise portals.